Portfolio Development and the Assessment of Prior Learning: Perspectives, Models and Practices

For over thirty years, portfolios have been used to help adult learners gain recognition for their prior learning and take greater control of their educational experiences. The portfolio has become a distinctive means of assessing such learning, serving as a meaningful alternative to conventional papers and standardized testing.

Portfolio Development and the Assessment of Prior Learning: Perspectives, Models, and Practices provides a primer of flexible approaches to shaping and conducting portfolio-development courses. It offers practitioners in the field an extensive range of model assignments, readings, and classroom activities, each organized around a specific theme: Academic Orientation, The Meaning of Education, Personal Exploration, Learning from the Outsider Within, The World of Work and Careers, and Dimensions of Expertise. Twelve case studies by practitioners in the field then show how academics in the US and around the English-speaking world have adapted the portfolio to changing circumstances in order to deliver academically rich educational services for adults. These case studies highlight portfolio development in the context of web-based instruction, changing institutional imperatives, service to historically disenfranchised groups, partnerships with industry, and cross-institutional cooperation.

In addition to serving as a valuable hands-on resource for practitioners, Portfolio Development and the Assessment of Prior Learning locates portfolios and assessment in a broad social and intellectual context. Thus, the authors also offer an historical overview of the usefulness of portfolios in the assessment of prior learning and then consider their use in the future, given current trends in higher education for adults. The book explores the implications of a changing educational landscape, in which new student populations, budgetary pressures, and understandings of knowledge both enrich and challenge student-centered approaches such as portfolios.

The approaches and case studies are not only valuable to adult educators but, equally, to faculty in higher education concerned with the development of competency- and outcomes-based assessment.

Elana Michelson is a mentor and professor of Cultural Studies at Empire State College and the Chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program. She has consulted extensively in the field of adult and experiential learning, most recently in opening opportunities for adult learners in post-apartheid South Africa. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on issues of multiculturalism, feminism, epistemology, and adult learning.

Alan Mandell is a mentor and professor in the social sciences and Director of the Mentoring Institute of Empire State College, where he has worked for almost thirty years. He has regularly written and guided workshops on adult and experiential learning. With his colleague Lee Herman he is the author of From Teaching to Mentoring: Principle and Practice, Dialogue and Life in Adult Education (Routledge, 2003).